NIH Director’s Blog, 10 November 2015 In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about…

Genetic Heritability of Ischemic Stroke and the Contribution of Previously Reported Candidate Gene and Genomewide Associations

Stroke.ahajournals.org: 10/4/12

Background and Purpose—The contribution of genetics to stroke risk, and whether this differs for different stroke subtypes, remains uncertain. Genomewide complex trait analysis allows heritability to be assessed from genomewide association study (GWAS) data. Previous candidate gene studies have identified many associations with stoke but whether these are important requires replication in large independent data sets. GWAS data sets provide a powerful resource to perform replication studies.

Methods—We applied genomewide complex trait analysis to a GWAS data set of 3752 ischemic strokes and 5972 controls and determined heritability for all ischemic stroke and the most common subtypes: large-vessel disease, small-vessel disease, and cardioembolic stroke. Read more